As he walked downstairs he could not help thinking that if his cousin’s death had not happened till a month later he himself would, almost certainly, have been dead before that time—in which case both life and eleven thousand a year would have been lost to him for the sake of one month more of patient waiting. What a surprise it would have been if in “that other place” his shade had suddenly encountered the shade of Lionel Dering! He dismissed the thought with an impatient shrug, but he could not help shivering, and for a moment or two an ice-cold air seemed to blow round him, that lifted his hair with its invisible fingers and touched his heart as with a death-cold hand.
Kester St. George and his uncle breakfasted tête-à-tête that morning. The meal was rather a late one. Messrs. Drayton and Whiffins had been up for hours, and were out exploring the beauties of the neighbourhood. “And as for Richard,” explained the General to Kester, “he’s one of the strangest fellows in existence. He takes his meals anyhow and at any time, and one never knows where to look for him, whether indoors or out. Still, I like the boy—yes, I can’t help liking him. By-the-by, I think he told me the other day that he had met you once or twice many years ago?”
“I never remember meeting Richard Dering but once,” answered Kester. “As you say, sir, that was many years ago.”
“Well, if you remember what he was like then, you won’t find him much altered now. But here he comes to speak for himself.”
As the General spoke, Richard Dering lounged slowly into the room through the open French window. He halted for a moment just inside the room, and the eyes of the two cousins met across the table, each one curious to see what the other was like.
Kester could not repress a start of surprise when Richard’s eyes met his. For the moment it seemed to him that in very truth they could be the eyes of none other than his dead cousin. They were the same in colour—dark gray—and the same in expression. But when he came to look more closely, he thought he saw in them something different; a something hard to define, but palpably there. Eyes, they were, cold, serious, stern, and vengeful almost; with nothing in them of that frank happy light which used to shine out of the eyes of Lionel Dering. And yet, with all this, Kester could not but feel that the similarity was startling. And then the voice, too! It might have been Lionel’s very self who spoke. It thrilled through Kester as though it were a voice speaking from the tomb.
Beyond the eyes and the voice, the points of dissimilarity between Richard and his dead brother were marked enough. Lionel had been fair-complexioned, with light flaxen beard and moustache, and wavy hair. Richard’s complexion, naturally very swarthy, had been still further browned by exposure to an Indian sun. He had short, straight, jet-black hair, parted carefully down the middle. He wore no beard or whiskers, but cultivated a thick drooping moustache of the darkest shade of brown. Running in a line from his left eyebrow down his cheek was the cicatrice or scar of an old wound, the result of an accident in boyhood.
Kester had a distinct recollection of this scar. It had struck him on the only previous occasion of his seeing Richard, as being a great disfigurement to an otherwise comely face. When you caught Richard’s profile, you said at once how like he was to his brother: in fact, both brothers had the St. George features—clear, bold, distinctly marked. Which, perhaps, was one reason why the General took to them more than he ever did to Kester, whose features were of a different type.
The two men eyed each other for a moment or two in silence. They might have been two gladiators about to engage in a deadly struggle, each of whom was measuring the other’s strength. “This man is my enemy,” was the thought that flashed through Kester’s brain; and for the moment his heart sank within him. The dark, stern, resolute-looking man before him would be a very different sort of person to cope with, from good-tempered, easy-going Lionel.
“Kester, this is my nephew, Richard, from India,” said the General. “Dick, this is your cousin, Kester St. George. You have met before, so I need not say another word.”